Content Management System, it certainly has an impressive professional sound to it. But what is it really, besides three nice sounding words? Broken down into pieces, each item carries with it the expected meaning.

Content is simply what is contained on you web pages; it is what the visitor views. What your reading right now is content on this site. Pretty straight forward thus far, isn't it.

Building on that, content management is how you manipulate that viewable data. Managing entails adding, editing, removing, and maybe even rearranging your content. Again, nothing spectacular or out of the ordinary.

That bring us to our last word, system. On the most basic of levels a system is a collection of smaller pieces that work together to carry out a task. For example a computer system contains a motherboard, processor, hard drive, memory, keyboard, etc that combined work to allow you to do such things as view this web page. Likewise a content management system is a collection of tools that together allow you to create and maintain the contents of you website.

Maybe that was enlightening or perhaps you felt as if it was all fairly self explanatory. Either way there is one more important piece of information about content management systems not contained within the name. One of the major goals of a CMS is to separate the data or content from the actual presentation of that data. In a legacy web page written in static html, the content and how it is seen are tightly coupled since it is all entered once into that html page and read from there. With a CMS, you content is stored somewhere(generally in a database) with minimal formatting and then a file or files are created that specify what the data should look like when it is displayed. By doing this we create the ability to easily maintain a consistent look and feel throughout a website and also can quickly and globally change that look.